by Ann Lambert
Ti-Coune tried to concentrate on the words she was saying.
“Turns out it was his mother. And his uncle.”
He took a breath. “I, I, um…don’t read that book.”
The girl showed him the photo again. “Have you seen this dog anywhere around here? I know it’s a crazy long shot, but he’s lost, and I have to find him.”
She looked directly at Ti-Coune. He had to turn away. He was looking into the eyes of a ghost. “No. I never seen him.”
She pocketed the photo. “If you see him, or you hear anyone talking about a dog that sounds like him, could you please let me know?”
She tapped on the bar as though to thank the bartender for his time, and turned away. Ti-Coune touched her arm and felt her slightly recoil. “How you lost your dog?”
He offered to buy the girl a beer, and after a moment’s hesitation, she accepted. Then she told him the story of her boyfriend, whom she found frozen to death beside a church where he was camping out, waiting for her. Ti-Coune was shocked that this girl lived on the streets. She described how the police treated her like someone who barely knew Christian, when in fact, she was the only real family he had. She didn’t cry. But she was devastated by what happened. She told Ti-Coune that she often felt like she wanted to die. She was staying alive to find her dog.
“I’m trying to find my sister.” He pulled out the photo of Hélène and waited for the girl’s reaction. She didn’t seem to see any resemblance. “Do you know her?”
She shook her head. “No. Sorry. I’ve never seen her.”
Ti-Coune explained that her picture was found in the pocket of a woman who’d been hit by a car. He didn’t know what the connection between them was.
“That’s disgusting. What kind of person would do that?” They both took a sip of their drinks, tacitly acknowledging that there was no real answer to that question. The girl downed the rest of her beer, slipped off her stool, and extended her hand.
“Thanks. I have to go. I hope you find your sister.”
Ti-Coune helped her get into her coat. “Where do you live—?” He cut the question off. “I mean, how do I find you if I hear something about your dog?”
She smiled and shrugged. “Just leave me a message here. The bartender will hang onto it.” She turned to go. “Oh. By the way. My name is Nia. With an ‘N.’ Like Nancy. What’s yours?”
“Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel Cousineau.”
And then, just like that, the ghost left the bar.
When Ti-Coune sat back on his stool, the game had resumed. But now there was a fresh Coke in front of him. He nodded his surprised thanks to the bartender, who pointed to a guy sitting at the end of his bar. He was very overweight and very sweaty, although the room was not at all warm. Blasts of cold air kept blowing in every time someone opened the door. The man pulled his bulk off his stool and approached Ti-Coune.
“Ti-Coune Cousineau!!! Ça s’ peut tu?? Can it be?? What the fuck are you doing back here?” He was breathing heavily and stared intently at Ti-Coune. The top of his head was completely hairless, but a tonsure of long, greasy, gray hair encircled his bald pate.
Ti-Coune had no idea who this guy was.
“C’est moi!” he thumped his chest. “Tu m’connais pas?” The face Ti-Coune once knew was so encased in fat he hadn’t recognized him. It was Guy, the bouncer at Cleopatra’s, a strip club Ti-Coune used to frequent.
“Nice haircut you got there.”
The man patted the top of his head and belly laughed. “You changed a bit yourself, mon ami.” He lifted a glass of whiskey and toasted Ti-Coune. “To old friends.”
Ti-Coune took a gulp of his Coke. Except it wasn’t Coke. It was mostly rum with a splash of Coke. He grimaced and set it back on the bar. The man leaned into his ear.
“Hey man, I see you like them young. I got a very sweet little piece for you. Very young. Very clean.”
Ti-Coune muttered, “Real men don’t buy girls.” His old friend almost spat out his whiskey he was laughing so hard and smacked Ti-Coune on the back.
“Shit, mon ami. How long has it been? Ten years? I heard you were up in the boonies there. Still working for the same people?”
Ti-Coune was trying very hard not to have another swallow of that drink. But saint tiboir it felt good. It felt warm. It felt right. “No. I have my own business now.”
The man whistled in appreciation. “So what are you in the big city for?”
But Ti-Coune wasn’t listening. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Walk away. Walk away. Now.
Ti-Coune finished his drink in three gulps. “Looking for a friend.” He ordered another rum and Coke. A double.
“Hope it wasn’t that guy they found two blocks from here last week—frozen like a popsicle. Outside a fucking church. A giant blue popsicle.” He laughed again at his own simile. “But I heard somebody killed him. Sat on him and choked him to death.”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“It’s just a rumor—you know how it is. People start talking, the next thing you know there’s a gang of zombies killing and eating homeless people.” He seemed to really appreciate that one and laughed even louder.
The hockey game was long over, and the bar had mostly emptied out by the time Ti-Coune tried to stand up and realized he was too hammered to walk. His old friend leaned drunkenly into his ear. “You know, a few of your old buddies might not be too happy to see you. If you need a little extra…A little extra protection. You let me know, okay?” He tried to wink at Ti-Coune but he was too drunk and the wink was a lopsided grimace.
Ti-Coune waved him off and staggered out the door and into the street. He tried to pull a cigarette from his pack of Drum but ended up dropping half of them in the snow. Then he toppled over into a snowbank. A few minutes later, he forced his frozen hand to dig out his phone and punched in a number.
Roméo Leduc was just driving home to Marie’s place when he got the call. After the interview with Annie Qinnuayuak, he had gone to the flat. Sophie was pretty depressed and threatening to go back to her boyfriend, so Roméo made her a good hot supper and then made sure she was ensconced before that addictive Netflix series. Then he pored over the autopsy report on Rosie Nukilik again. Forensic evidence can be very ambiguous, but he felt this was not. She had been smothered. He also looked at the autopsies of the two women Steve Pouliot had flagged. There was definitely something not adding up there. The second woman, Shannon Amittuk, had clearly died in circumstances that did not point to suicide. Roméo was disgusted at the sloppy, uninterested investigation. His car phone rang.
“Hey! C’est…mo—i.” Ti-Coune was having trouble getting his words out.
Roméo listened for more, but there was a long pause. Then Ti-Coune continued, but he was barely coherent.
“I…s-s-saw. Hélène. Tonight.”
“What? You found her?”
“Well. Not Hélène. But a ghost. A beautiful ghost. Hey, her boyfriend, he died in a church. Someone sat on him and killed him.”
“What did you say?”
“She’ssss looking for Hamlet. Hamlet. Is Gone.” Ti-Coune started to cry. “She loves her dog. And she lost her dog.”
“Ti-Coune, where are you?”
He managed to tell Roméo that he was outside the Cock and Bull, and he was just going to have a little nap. Roméo turned the car around and headed east towards downtown.
After pulling him out of a filthy snowbank, half-dragging him up the stairs of the rooming house, waiting as he puked his insides into the toilet, and finally throwing him into his bed, Roméo was ready to head out. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Ti-Coune lay curled up in the single bed, his hands tucked under his head. For one brief moment, Roméo could see the little boy that Ti-Coune was so many years and lives ago.
As he got into his car, he couldn’t stop thinking about what Ti
-Coune had said. Were two people now dead, killed by asphyxiation that was not accidental? The Montreal police had not mentioned the second recent homicide. By traumatic asphyxiation. What was going on here? What was Hélène Cousineau’s connection to Rosie Nukilik? Was Hélène even alive? Was she in danger? Roméo’s head was spinning with fatigue and too many possibilities. Too many tabs open in his brain. He glanced at the time. Marie was a very light sleeper, and he would certainly disturb her coming in at this hour. Sophie could sleep through a war. Roméo decided to go home to his daughter. But as he drove through the deserted, snowy streets of Montreal, he couldn’t help but think: did they have a serial killer on their hands?
Thirty-Three
Friday morning
February 8, 2019
DANIELLE CHAMPAGNE HESITATED just a moment, and then she pushed the heavy door open. Everyone—including her Chief of Curation for E-Content, her Beauty Director, and Strategies for Lifestyle Director—was on their feet, smiling and applauding her enthusiastically and without a trace of irony, as far as she could tell. The deal she just negotiated to expand into the northeast US market was huge. There was also talk of opening two actual retail stores of curated exclusive products for women and men in two cities. Toronto was a done deal. New York was more elusive, but Danielle felt certain that would eventually happen. She was in no big hurry just now. La Vie Champagne was rocketing into the stratosphere of success and Danielle was trying to enjoy the view. One of the issues on the table that morning was to finalize the name for the Toronto store. Danielle didn’t want her name on the store at all, but her associates felt differently. She didn’t want to become like Oprah—her face on the cover of every issue of her own monthly magazine. Would she call it “D”? Or “Danielle”? That was a kind of narcissism that made her a bit uncomfortable. As the two young interns popped open several bottles of champagne and poured them into the waiting flute glasses, Chloé cleared her throat and stood at the head of the enormous table. Once everyone had their glass in hand, she raised hers to Danielle.
“To good sex, good sleep, good coffee, and great BIG GONADS!”
All the women in the room laughed. Her television interview had gone viral. There were memes of Danielle repeating those words over and over again. There were photo-shopped images of her and a horrified Donald Trump comparing her hands to his. Hers were much bigger, of course. There was her and Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or Mohammed bin Salman looking down between their legs and Danielle celebrating her clear victory with triumphant upraised arms. The women all bowed their heads to Danielle, lifted their glasses and then sipped at the champagne. The interns glanced around nervously to see if anyone’s needed refilling. Not at ten o’clock in the morning.
Danielle wet her lips but not much more—she needed to be clear-headed for the day—and gestured for everyone to take their seats. Chloé began to hand out the material for the meeting, giving each woman a glossy champagne-colored folder. Laptops opened. Phones were placed within reach of nervous fingertips. Danielle went to the side table to fetch herself a croissant to go with the champagne. An intern hastened over to her with a cloth napkin. Danielle thanked her, asked her to please make her a double espresso, and took her seat at the head of the table.
Her CFO was walking them through a very thorough report on quarterly projections, but Danielle’s thoughts had minds of their own. Her eyes felt as though someone had held a hot blow dryer to them, as she’d slept very little the night before. Again. When she had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, she’d had another disturbing nightmare. She was with her ex-husband in his red Peugeot sports car, and he was driving much too fast. Danielle begged him to slow down, but he refused. Instead he lurched off the highway and headed directly towards a lake. When they approached the huge pier that seemed to run halfway across it, he drove the car onto it even faster. Danielle wanted to jump out, but they were going too fast and she was too terrified. Her ex anticipated her plan to escape and hit the door lock. The next thing she knew, they were flying off the end of the dock and hitting the surface of the water hard. Then they were underwater, and she was desperately trying to open her door, but the pressure made it impossible. He had managed to escape, though, and she was alone in the car as it slowly sank to the bottom of the lake.
She woke up to the sound of her own moaning, her face soaked with tears.
Danielle opened her eyes to the droning of her CFO’s voice and realized she must have nodded off for a minute, as Lise was already concluding her report. As she stifled another yawn and willed herself to keep her eyes open, the door to the boardroom began to open silently. Thank God, here was the coffee at last. The young woman bumped the huge door open wider with her hip and Danielle expected to see a tray of coffee appear as she turned around. But there was no tray. No coffee. And she wasn’t the intern. It was another woman. She had dead-straight, long, black hair and was wearing a white parka zipped up to her throat. She stood motionless, staring directly at Danielle, her eyes a luminous black-brown. She didn’t move, but a suggestion of a smile began to form on her gaunt face. It was her. It was Rosie Nukilik.
Danielle gasped out loud and covered her face with her hands. No one really seemed to notice except Chloé, who hastened to Danielle, and leaned over her.
“Are you all right?”
Danielle slowly lowered her hands. Too frightened to open her eyes, she hesitated a few seconds.
“Danielle? Can I get you something?”
By now, everyone had turned away from the PowerPoint on the screen and towards Danielle. She slowly opened her eyes and forced herself to look towards the door. Rosie Nukilik was gone. The intern appeared with her coffee, and Danielle lifted the cup to her lips with trembling hands. She had to get clear, had to get some sleep or she would completely fall apart. Danielle hated sleeping pills, but she resolved that night to take them and fix this once and for all.
Penelope, her marketing director, started her presentation on the extraordinary claims of a new weight-loss product based on maple tree water that La Vie Champagne was looking at, but then Danielle noticed her mouth kept moving and no sound was coming out. She suddenly felt like the air had been extracted from the room, and there was a high-pitched ringing like someone striking a tuning fork. Was she going to faint? She dropped her head into her hands and tried to breathe through whatever this was. Her eyes felt stuck shut. She knew Rosie was back in the room. She could feel her. When she finally opened her eyes, Rosie was sitting at the other end of the table in Penelope’s chair. Rosie was still wearing her parka, and continued her examination of Danielle with that same half-smile on her face. Danielle forced herself to stand up and half-staggered to the door, giving Rosie a wide berth. She managed to get to the washroom down the long, carpeted hall without passing out.
The water felt amazingly restorative. She splashed and splashed it onto her face and ran it over her wrists. She clutched at the edge of the cold sink. If she could just stay still for a few minutes, the ringing would go away and she could get clear. Danielle had tried to watch the news—had tried to read what little coverage there was in the paper about Rosie—the same photo of her was used again and again, in her beautiful white parka with the embroidery, a broad, toothy smile on her face, looking directly at the camera. But that’s as far as Danielle could go. She just could not know any more about this woman or she would go completely off the deep end. Danielle heard the swish of the bathroom door open. She knew it was her. No, it wasn’t. This was absurd. There are no fucking ghosts. She was just exhausted. Epuisée. Nothing left. Still, she could not bring herself to open her eyes. She heard an intake of breath.
“Danielle? What’s going on? Are you sick? Can I call you a car to take you home?”
Relieved, she opened her eyes to a sincerely stricken-
looking Chloé, who watched Danielle’s reflection in the mirror. She didn’t move, just held onto the sink and kept her eyes steady on her assistan
t’s face. Chloé took a step toward her with an outstretched hand, but Danielle waved her away.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Chloé didn’t know what to do, either, so she continued to stand there. Her boss leaned heavily against the wall, then slowly sank to the bathroom floor and hugged her knees tightly to her chest. Chloé joined her on the floor, tucking her tight skirt under her bum. Danielle stared ahead of her, unable to make further eye contact. The words fell from her in such a catharsis of relief and shame.
“I’ve done something terrible. And I don’t know what to do.”
Chloé reached out for her boss’s hand and gently held it. She would have to get back to the meeting soon, though. She discreetly checked the time on her phone. She decided to wait three minutes before she returned to the room and declared the meeting adjourned.
Thirty-Four
“LIKE LOVERS, Tahiti and her islands in French Polynesia are meant to be embraced….”
Sitting before her iPad, Gennifer Moran scrolled through the article from a high-end travel magazine. It was full of island paradise clichés, but when a place really was an island paradise cliché what else was there to say? She had considered going to Panama, or Vietnam, or Australia, or Hawaii, but Tahiti sounded like the place for her. Jean Luc had promised her anywhere in the world, and she was going to take him up on the offer before things got too busy again and she couldn’t get away. It looked like the island of Tahiti itself was a place to avoid, but Bora Bora and Moorea seemed gorgeous. She thought of those exquisite paintings Paul Gaugin painted of Tahitian women. How shocked the art world in Paris was of his embracing of this culture and especially its beautiful young women. She looked out the window at a very different scene from a South Pacific Eden. It was a bitter, nasty day, and people were rushing by just trying to get to their destination, leaning into the wind, their coats clutched at their necks. The door to the café blew open a with a blast of cold air, and a young woman stood there tentatively for a few moments before she began to unravel the over-long scarf around her neck and remove her mittens. That must be her, Gennifer thought. She let the young woman scan the room for at least a minute before she raised her hand to call her over. The girl lifted her head in recognition and headed to the small, round table for two.
